2007/04/22

Baseball notes

I've watched a lot of baseball these last few weeks, and I've found that about three-quarters of the commercials are either for cars or lawn care products. So would we even have televised baseball if the suburbs didn't exist?

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The best change that could be made in baseball - other than fully socializing revenues among the teams as the first step toward converting the majors to parecon relations of production - would be to change the name of the Cleveland Indians. It's bad enough they're called the Indians, but they insist on retaining their racist caricature logo too. I think they should rename themselves the Spiders. The Cleveland Spiders played from 1887 to 1899 in the old American Association. Cy Young, one of the greatest pitchers to ever play the game, started his career with them and led them to the championship in 1895. Then the owners of the team bought the St Louis Browns and moved all the Spiders' good players there. The 1899 Spiders team was the worst in baseball history, finishing 20-134 and 84 games out of first place (!!!!). The attendance at games was so low (averaging 179 per game) that other teams refused to come to Cleveland, so the Spiders had to play their last 36 games on the road. They lost 35 of those. That was the last season the Spiders played. The team that would eventually be called the Indians started playing in 1901.

Avenge the betrayal of the Spiders! End the racist Indians! Revive the Cleveland Spiders!

2 comments:

i have a similar issue with the lane tech indian "mascot" or "embelem" or whatever it is. though my first choice would be changing it to the lane tech spiders (though admittedly, there would be no historical basis for this) i would also accept the compromise of changing the american indian to an asian indian. of course, in that case the "Lane Tech Hindoos" might be a better name.

baseball really bores me, unless i'm playing it. however, i agree. this was actually a 'case' i 'ran' in high school debate on the topic of education. i read a lot of this dude, dr pewewardy. he puts the case simply, and well: